The 100 Greatest Country Albums of All Time

The first album cover with Kenny Chesney on a beach — and certainly not the last. No Problem was the Tennessee native’s first Number One album, and “The Good Stuff” marked the first successful crossover hit (who could resist a tearjerker about a wise, milk-drinking bartender?) on his way to building a lifestyle empire. Chesney also created his own genre of nostalgic banger with songs like “Young” and “A Lot of Things Different,” then sang about dreams of country fame in “Big Star.” Always an admirer of songwriters, Chesney goes full Tunnel of Love on “One Step Up,” indisputably one of the greatest Springsteen covers of all time. Welcome to the place where there’s “No boss, no clock, no stress, no dress code,” and your only requirement is to chill for a bit. —A.M.

One of the biggest live attractions of the mid-Fifties, Wells was country’s first major female star — she was, to use a word that didn’t yet exist, relatable. Wells was anti-glamour, the girl next door with an indomitable sense of self-worth; the only thing worse than being cheated upon (“There’s Poison in Your Heart”) is the guilt of being the cheater: “Paying for That Back Street Affair” is the most pained of her many answer records (“Back Street Affair” was a 1952 hit for Webb Pierce). Wells’ singles have been collected many times, but it’s hard to top this 1956 LP — the singles go back four years, and it remains a sensational introduction. —M. Matos

The third album from Keith Urban was a multi-pronged statement from the Australian upstart. Not only was he a crack guitarist who could weave effortlessly virtuosic licks into down-home cuts like the upbeat “Who Wouldn’t Wanna Be Me” and the cowbell-led “You Look Good in My Shirt,” he was also a keen observer of Y2K pop, echoing the R&B ballads of the time on the breakup cut “You’ll Think of Me” and scattering drum loops amid the album’s fiddles and mandolins. The love song “Somebody Like You” remains a pinnacle of 21st-century country cuts all the way to its fake ending — and its coda shows off Urban’s guitar heroism, as well as his delight in making a love song that also happens to kick butt. —M.J.

Formed in Lubbock, Texas, in 1972 by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and Joe Ely, and existing for only a year, the Flatlanders played high-lonesome hippie country that drew on a sweeter, more whimsical alienation than the outlaw sound that was emerging in Texas at the same time. Set against a woozy singing saw, Gilmore’s wayward quaver gave songs like “Dallas” and “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Downtown” a sad, mystical beauty. The Flatlanders garnered no interest at the time, and had all long since gone on to worthy solo careers when this 1990 compilation was released, cementing their status as a Velvet Underground of the Americana scene. —J.D.

Waco, Texas, native Hank Thompson played a hard-driving mix of honky-tonk and western swing, backed by his killer band the Brazos Valley Boys, which featured guitar god Merle Travis. A Six Pack to Go is a sterling collection of drinking songs full of happy-hour heedlessness and lonely last-call dejection. “No longer proud I’ve joined the crowd and laid my honor down,” he sings in his buoyant baritone, summing up the obliterated pathos of an LP that makes the Replacements look like Methodist teetotalers. The musicianship is so good even the polka tunes are worth a spin, and Thompson also included a remake of his signature hit “The Wild Side of Life,” an anthem of spurned dejection that inspired Kitty Wells’ feminist bowshot “It Wasn’t God That Made Honky Tonk Angels.” —J.D.  

“As far as I’m concerned, Ernest Tubb hung the moon,” Loretta Lynn wrote in her memoir, Coal Miner’s Daughter. As always, Miss Loretta was right. Tubb was born in Texas in 1914, and grew up learning to yodel like his hero Jimmie Rodgers. But ironically, it took a tonsillectomy to give him the low, flat voice that made him famous. He scored his first and biggest hit in 1941, “Walking the Floor Over You.” The Ernest Tubb Story is a 1959 double-vinyl set of classics like “Let’s Say Goodbye Like We Said Hello,” remade with his Texas Troubadours, including guitar legend Billy Byrd. Tubb kept making ace albums like The Importance of Being Ernest and his Loretta Lynn duet Singin’ Again, which included their 1967 hit “Sweet Thang.” —R.S.

Kenny Rogers never seemed to quite leave his psychedelic First Edition past behind, recording some of the oddest (and most fun) songs in country-music history. The Gambler is full of that experimentation, from lite funk and disco to power balladry to a calypso-tinged track that seems to be about Jesus (“A Little More Like Me (The Crucifixion)”). Rogers seemed to approach every project hellbent on using every last resource the label would throw his way, tossing tired ideas about authenticity and credibility to the side. It’s still funny that the Don Schlitz-penned title track, far and away the straightest “country” song on the album, became Rogers’ signature despite being first cut by Bobby Bare and Johnny Cash. —N.W.

Cheekily named in honor of a country supergroup whose individual members are well-represented on this list, the Highwomen made for a thrilling summit of pop-country ringers (Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby) and critically adored singer-songwriters (Amanda Shires, Brandi Carlile). Their lone album to date reframes Jimmy Webb’s “Highwayman” to tell the stories of women’s undying spirits, a theme that continues throughout. They offer takes on motherhood both funny (“My Name Can’t Be Mama”) and moving (“My Only Child”), relationship songs that chide like Loretta Lynn (“Don’t Call Me”), and even a brilliant, swooning ballad about queer love (“If She Ever Leaves Me”). When their voices are piled high in harmony, it’s the beautiful sound of revolution. —J.F.

Florida native Gram Parson’s idea of “cosmic American music” — encompassing soul, country, blues, and gospel — was dizzyingly ahead of its time, but his first album with the Flying Burrito Brothers (after leaving the Byrds) made Parsons seem like he could pluck that very thing out of the air. Parsons damns “Sin City” while hippies get pulled over by cops, but the album’s heart is in the heartbroken ballads borrowed (“Dark End of the Street”) and new, most unforgettably “Hot Burrito #1,” the most devastated white blues singing of the Sixties —M. Matos.

Connie Smith began her reign as Nashville royalty when her recording of Bill Anderson’s “Once a Day” topped the charts for eight weeks, making her the first woman in country music to do so with her debut single. Gifted with a rafter-rattling voice that was as commanding as it was sorrowful, Smith’s self-titled debut was enhanced by Weldon Myrick’s steel guitar, who complements the various moods and textures conveyed in her vocals. Anderson also penned the hit “Then and Only Then” and its B side, “Tiny Blue Transistor Radio,” along with the deceptively peppy gem “The Threshold.” But for pure pathos, Smith is at her forlorn best on the classic “Darling, Are You Ever Coming Home,” penned by Willie Nelson and Hank Cochran. On the whole, it’s a soulful, urgent introduction to one of country music’s most respected interpreters of song. —S.B.

The Hank Snow singles gathered here include some of the most important in country history. Originals like “I’m Movin’ On” (a country chart-topper for 21 weeks in 1950) and “Golden Rocket” updated the train songs of Snow’s hero, Jimmie Rodgers — upping the pace and smoothing the ride as if transitioning country music from coal to diesel. The 1954 Number One “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” exhibited a kind of balladry more typically associated with pop and R&B, and his “Rhumba Boogie” helped introduce rhythm “in a South American style” to country radio. He synthesized honky-tonk, singing cowboy music, bluegrass, western swing, and Nashville studio gloss into something new: country & western, as it was called for a time. Alongside Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, and Eddy Arnold, Snow is where modern country begins. —D.C.

They were called “America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly Band” — a title that was nominally inspired by their early adoption of the Nudie suit, but was just as relevant to their rowdy take on western swing. Approaching spirituals, Hank Williams covers, and Woody Guthrie songs with equal gusto, the group and its singer Rose offered a powerful record of good-timing irreverence. At a time when women struggled to be recorded at all, Rose was singing about honky-tonkin’ and marrying for money — not to mention her take on the folk classic “I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again.” In the years that followed, the Maddoxes would inspire not just country, but rock and rockabilly with their carefree, brash sound. —N.W.

In August 2011, Glen Campbell and his wife, Kim, announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The sad news was made even more poignant by the release of this exceptional album, which was expected to be his final studio effort. Producer Julian Raymond, who collaborated with Campbell on several of the standout cuts, nods to the guitar hero’s session-playing past through Beach Boys-inspired interludes while also offering surprising renditions of songs by Paul Westerberg, Jakob Dylan, Teddy Thompson, and Guided by Voices leader Robert Pollard. This all might have seemed a stretch for the pop-country superstar who once took Jimmy Webb’s songs to chart glory, but for a man who confronted mortality and embraced his abiding faith, there was no finer way to say goodbye. —S.B.

Blending the gently robust sonics of Nineties adult contemporary with the folksy charm of Nineties country, Faith Hill’s third album swung for the fences upon the 1998 release of its lead single, “This Kiss” — and that over-the-moon love song wound up transcending genre and national borders. The rest of Faith is a showcase for Hill’s strong, impassioned voice, which gives ballads like “Let Me Let Go” extra emotional oomph, adds a sly wink to the aphorism-stuffed “The Secret of Life,” and tenderly entwines with her husband Tim McGraw’s on the Diane Warren-penned “Just to Hear You Say That You Love Me.” —M.J. 

West Virginia-born Brad Paisley’s eighth album is a full-bore showcase of late-2000s life from his perspective, which is pretty rosy: The title track is an ode to American multiculturalism as told through internationally borne detritus like Beatles records and Italian ices, while “Welcome to the Future” is “Right Here, Right Now” for 21st-century Nashville, its closing rave-up introduced by a blippy synthesizer. With other artists, this optimism could come off as cloying, but Paisley’s willingness to put it all out there, top-notch guitar playing, and conversational croon make American Saturday Night a friendly, raucous throwback to the Obama era. —M.J. 

The greatest collection of Western ballads ever released, Robbins’ fifth album was a success on the country and pop charts. Audiences in the era of TV westerns and John Wayne mythology would’ve been content with a collection of songs about stoic gunslingers and doomed shootouts (a vibe he definitely nails on the album-opening “Big Iron”). But Robbins touched a deeper nerve, imbuing songs like “El Paso” and “They’re Hanging Me Tonight” with an introspective quality of wandering loneliness over hauntingly spare accompaniment that added to the solitary grandeur of his voice. When he finally finds peace in “The Little Green Valley,” it’s a genuinely lovely moment of redemption. —J.D.

Jessi Colter’s sound drew only from the richest source material: country, certainly, but also gospel, funk, and blues. As a result, I’m Jessi Colter sounds ahead of its time, anticipating decades of “blues and roots” albums that similarly tap pared-down sounds. There is an unfiltered quality to Colter’s singing, too; her less-than-optimal token status as “the lady outlaw” at least saved her from the pressure to mask all the emotion in her voice. The album’s hit single, “I’m Not Lisa,” looks in retrospect like an anomaly, a breathy ballad on an album of groovy blues and walk-the-floor laments. Instead it’s the earworm “What’s Happened to Blue Eyes” that endures. Staggeringly pretty, it’s as classically country as it gets. —N.W.

Hailing from San Benito, Texas, where his family were poor migrant farm workers, the man born Baldermar Huerta adopted the stage name Freddy Fender, but didn’t downplay his roots when he turned to country music in the early Seventies. With his 1974 ballad “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” he topped the pop and country charts while boldly singing half of the lyrics in Spanish, and successfully deployed the same bilingual strategy on lush, sensitive versions of standards like “The Wild Side of Life” and “After the Fire Is Gone” to create this fantastic album of Tex-Mex slow jams. —J.D.

Brandy Clark was already an established hit songwriter, but it was the release of her debut that put her in the conversation as one of this century’s best country scribes. Her stories are about women who cheat, who are cheated upon, and who divorce husbands they’ve outgrown, and her songs are full of punchlines that delight and devastate. One working-class narrator makes certain to “pray to Jesus” for help but also makes sure to “play the lotto.” And seemingly “crazy women,” she explains, “are made by crazy men” — it’s the sharpest misogyny explainer since Kitty Wells schooled men on who made honky-tonk angels. Throughout, Clark’s secret weapon is her singing, which comes off easy and game for fun then soars heartbreakingly high and lonesome like a blue-collar Emmylou Harris. —D.C.

The musically adventurous Margo Price has gone on to experiment with psychedelic soul and acid country in recent years, but on her 2016 debut, she leaned hard on Loretta Lynn vibes to stellar results. “About to Find Out” and “This Town Gets Around” have “Fist City” energy for days, and “Hurtin’ (On the Bottle)” and “Weekender” warn of what happens when you come home a-drinkin’. Price’s lyricism is straightforward throughout Midwest Farmer’s Daughter; she writes in clear, concise, and often first-person language. No more so than on the six-minute “Hands of Time,” a retelling of her life story that includes both the loss of the family farm and her son. —J.H.

Where hat acts like Alan Jackson and Garth Brooks offered one rough-and-tumble version of masculinity, Vince Gill represented a sensitive alternative who turned out to be a hot picker, great songwriter, and extraordinary singer to boot. When Love Finds You has him in top form, switching between spacious soft-rock ballads like “Whenever You Come Around” and Telecaster-driven two-steppers like “What the Cowgirls Do.” He shows his appreciation for classic country, nailing a weepy ballad in the Bill Anderson co-write “Which Bridge to Cross (Which Bridge to Burn).” And if the hymnlike “Go Rest High on That Mountain” doesn’t make you feel something, check your pulse — they might be playing it at your funeral, after all. —J.F. 

Alison Krauss was just 20 and already a Grammy-winning musician by the time she released Every Time You Say Goodbye, an enchanting collection of bluegrass standards, originals, and well-chosen covers. The best of those, Shawn Colvin’s “I Don’t Know Why” and Karla Bonoff’s “Lose Again,” are vivid examples of Krauss’ ability to blend ebullience with aching tenderness, as are the breathtaking ballads “Last Love Letter” and “New Fool.” Future Union Station member Dan Tyminski makes his first songwriting contribution to the band, which also features Barry Bales and Ron Block. Though it’s Krauss’ spotlight, the album presents a sublime master class in bluegrass musicianship and communal spirit. —S.B.

Alan Jackson was one of the best things to happen to Nineties country radio, with a neo-trad honky-tonk style and a soulful grin in his voice. His sophomore blockbuster, Don’t Rock the Jukebox, had hits like “Dallas” and “Midnight in Montgomery,” where he has a chat with the ghost of Hank Williams. Jackson has a rare knack for honoring his roots without sounding retro, as in the rowdy title tune, where he pleads, “Don’t rock the jukebox/I wanna hear some Jones/My heart ain’t ready/For the Rolling Stones.” George Jones himself showed up in the video as well as the album, where he does a cameo on the tribute “Just Playin’ Possum.” —R.S.

For his fifth album, Dierks Bentley wanted to switch things up a bit, so he decided to delve into his long-standing love of American bluegrass. The slight shift in focus, as well as some well-chosen collaborators and cover songs, clearly energized Bentley, and his robust voice nestles into the furiously played fiddles, mandolins, and banjos surrounding it. Bentley’s rock-informed take on country is still present; along with the modern string band the Punch Brothers and bluegrass legend Del McCoury, he gives U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” a luminous revamp that retains the original’s grandeur. Up on the Ridge gave Bentley a creative shot in the arm that would animate his later work as well. —M.J.

Williams cemented his outlaw-offspring identity with 1979’s Family Tradition, but it was this follow-up, released later that same year, which more cohesively summed up the artist nicknamed “Bocephus.” The title track is a mission statement on getting royally fucked-up, while “Outlaw Women” celebrates the rough-around-the-edges ladies he entertains on that bender. A cover of the George Jones staple “White Lightnin’” and “The Conversation,” a duet about his pioneering dad with Waylon Jennings, are satisfying fun, but it’s the dark honesty of songs like “(I Don’t Have) Anymore Love Songs” and “O.D.’d in Denver” that give the record its edge. Listen to the latter, about a series of cocaine blackouts, and just try to imagine any country-radio star bold enough to put that on an album today. —J.H.

Carpenter, an Ivy League-educated New Englander, isn’t exactly your archetypal blue-collar country singer. But she excels at writing thoughtful narratives and interpreting material from other songwriters. The 1992 album Come On Come On is a master class in both disciplines — a multiplatinum release that went seven singles deep on the strength of country-rock bangers like “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” and “I Feel Lucky.” Carpenter also put Lucinda Williams’ work on the country charts with a revved-up cover of “Passionate Kisses,” and duetted with the underappreciated great Joe Diffie (RIP) on “Not Too Much to Ask.” All these were contrasted perfectly with her heart-tugging ballads about the quiet beauty of small-town life (“I Am a Town”), family trauma (“Only a Dream”), and the cocktail of desire and memory (“Come On Come On”). Thirty years on, it remains one of the Nineties’ most emotionally resonant albums. —J.F.

The leader of the 400 Unit went it alone for 2013’s Southeastern, an unflinching look at what the Alabama native had been going through, including addiction and new love. Isbell’s pointillistic lyrics, placed front and center by the thoughtful production of Americana guru Dave Cobb, burnished his already-impressive reputation as a songwriter, with the devastating “Elephant,” a depiction of a friend being ravaged by and ultimately succumbing to cancer, ending on a shattering truism: “There’s one thing that’s real clear to me/No one dies with dignity/We just try to ignore the elephant somehow.” —M.J.

As the first major Black female artist in country, Martell was a historic figure in and of herself. But her one and only album, released before she was (in her mind) blackballed from the business, demonstrated she wasn’t a novelty act. Thanks to her roots in R&B and soul, her mighty voice easily slid into a yodel or adapted effortlessly to heartbreak ballads like “The Wedding Cake” and “I Almost Called Your Name.” And the lean honky-tonk arrangements gave plenty of acts at the time, male or female, a run for their money. —D.B.

Elvis left Memphis for Nashville in the summer of 1970 and reconnected with his country roots — not the rockabilly country of his Fifties golden-boy period, but a more measured, soulful brand of Nashville sound. The result was one of his best vocal sessions ever captured on tape: Presley interpreted songs like Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Bob Wills’ “Faded Love” and the Hank Cochran gem “Make the World Go Away.” A signature of Ray Price, and later Eddy Arnold, “Make the World Go Away” becomes a robust cry for Presley, one of many songs he’d cut in the Seventies that reflected his own struggle with the increasing confines of fame. —J.H.

No longer sharing the spotlight with songwriter and duet partner Porter Wagoner, the shrewd, self-assured Parton made a bid at superstardom with this album, which earned her first pair of Top 20 pop hits in the bubbly title cut and the deliciously funky “Two Doors Down.” Parton insisted she wasn’t leaving country behind but taking fans along for the ride; the album still stirred up a pop-vs.-country debate. Even so, there’s little point arguing that any album that includes Parton’s own devastating “Me and Little Andy” is anything less than a brave musical marvel. —S.B.

West Virginia-born singer-activist Hazel Dickens broke into the male-dominated world of bluegrass in the 1950s with a piercing, high-lonesome voice that, when paired with Alice Gerrard’s alto, forged a creative bond that was highly influential. When first issued in 1973 on Rounder Records, this extraordinary collection of acoustic folk and country was hailed as an important document of bluegrass from a modern feminist perspective. Its impact was lasting: Naomi Judd brought home a copy from a Berea, Kentucky, record store in 1976 and played it for daughter Wynonna. “Their whole sound was so unpolished, so authentic, they were unabashedly just who they were — it was really like looking in the mirror of truth,” Naomi told the Washington Post in 1996. —S.B.

The Louvin Brothers came out of Sand Mountain, Alabama, as the greatest singing duo in country history, with steady Charlie eternally cursed by his brother Ira’s drinking, fighting, mandolin-smashing ways, until they finally split up after years of hits. Satan Is Real embodies that sin-salvation dichotomy with an almost comically over-the-top power that’s at once uplifting and terrifying, opening with the fire-and-brimstone sermon of the title track, setting a very high moral example with “The Christian Life,” then looking you straight in the eye to ask “Are You Afraid to Die.” By the end of this record, you better have a good answer. —J.D.

The upstate New York-bred singer-songwriter would transform the parameters of what Lone Star state country music could sound like for decades to come when he decided to record his upcoming album live on the fly at a mythical old-fashioned beer hall in Luckenbach. The resulting album “created an image of what Texas [music] was and could be,” as bandmate and songwriter Gary P. Nunn, who contributed the album’s classic closer “London Homesick Blues,” put it. Walker only wrote four of the record’s nine songs himself, using the record as a way to showcase some of the best songwriters being ignored by Nashville at the time, such as Guy Clark, Michael Martin Murphy and Ray Wylie Hubbard — artists who were, as Walker would later say, “Made in Texas, for Texas.” —J.B.

“Mr. and Mrs. Country Music” finalized their extremely bitter divorce a year before their seventh and finest album together was released (“George is one of those people who can’t tolerate happiness,” Tammy lamented). They poured their romantic angst into the devastating title track, in which a wedding band becomes a Tolkienesque talisman of promise and ruin, as well as the irony of “Even the Bad Times Are Good” and “Near You.” No matter how they were feeling about each other at the time, the chemistry they have is rock solid, whether they’re singing about loving or losing or cheating or something in between (as in the any-port-in-a-storm resignation of “Keep the Change”). What emerged is a truly great, and deeply real, breakup album for the ages. —J.D.

By the early Nineties, honky-tonk wizard Dwight Yoakam was feeling the urge to expand his sound. His 1993 album, This Time, accomplished that, tying together his ability to interpret classic country songcraft with loads of new sonic textures. There’s weepy, shuffling two-step in the title track, while “Ain’t That Lonely Yet” is a soaring anthem of bitterness, and “Wild Ride” crackles with FM-rock energy. “Fast as You” positively rips, mixing a spiky “Pretty Woman”-style guitar riff with stabs of Hammond organ while Yoakam reminds an ex just how bitchy that old karma can be. Best of all is “A Thousand Miles From Nowhere,” an existential reverie that evokes atmospheric, hazy dream-pop more than it does Merle Haggard. Amazingly, it still reached Number Two on country radio. —J.F.

Flatt and Scruggs were the grand old men of bluegrass, both veterans of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. North Carolina boy Earl Scruggs played the banjo, Tennessee stud Lester Flatt played guitar, and together they became the music’s foremost ambassadors. Their 1949 “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” became the most famous of all bluegrass tunes, finding a new audience as the theme from Bonnie and Clyde. Foggy Mountain Jamboree is their classic 1957 album, with their Foggy Mountain Boys at peak strength. Scruggs shows off his virtuoso three-finger style in rapid-fire instrumentals like “Foggy Mountain Chimes” and “Flint Hill Special,” making this album the Are You Experienced? of the banjo. —R.S. 

In 1998, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s CMF Records produced this excellent 60-track overview of the crucial role Black performers have had in recorded country music since the 1920s, along with its influence on artists outside the genre. Contributions from early pioneers including Deford Bailey, Lead Belly, and the Mississippi Sheiks are presented alongside tunes from underappreciated country artists Stoney Edwards and Big Al Downing plus pop and soul acts like Diana Ross and the Supremes, Joe Tex, and the Staple Singers, demonstrating the artists’ deep enthusiasm for a genre that didn’t necessarily support them back. —S.B.

With his crack backup band, Owens pioneered the “Bakersfield sound,” a tight, frisky, twangy approach to the music named after the California town. Carnegie Hall Concert, one of the must-own live country albums, more than proves that Owens and the band could replicate their sound onstage, down to guitarist Don Rich’s harmonies. Versions here of the saucy “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” and the happily lovesick “Under Your Spell Again,” are so airtight they could well be studio versions. But the album also captures the exuberance Owens brought to honky-tonk, whether he’s playing the lovable loser in “Act Naturally” or the horny narrator of “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” and “Waitin’ in Your Welfare Line.” No wonder he wound up with a co-hosting gig on Hee Haw. —D.B.

Ruminative, delicate, and exposed as a nerve ending, Lefty Frizzell’s voice remains the definitive nasal honky-tonk twang, and in the Fifties and Sixties he put a passel of first-rate material over with it. “I Love You a Thousand Ways” is about the most defenseless ode to ardor ever waxed — but Frizzell could turn right around and deliver, with utter conviction and dry as a bone, “Don’t Think It Ain’t Been Fun, Dear (’Cuz It Ain’t).” The confounding part: He didn’t change his delivery in any way. —M. Matos

Unlike the over-the-top ballads popular at the time, Patty Loveless’ When Fallen Angels Fly — named for a Billy Joe Shaver song — is earthy and deep, grounded by her voice. Powerful choruses are juxtaposed with intimate, acoustic sounds on “Here I Am” and “You Don’t Even Know Who I Am,” creating a template for pop country that embraced traditional instrumentation. At the same time, the album is chock-full of two-step-ready classics. “I Try to Think About Elvis” is ridiculously fun, a believable and humorous take on early love; “Halfway Down,” “Old Weakness (Comin’ On Strong),”  and “Feelin’ Good About Feelin’ Bad” also deserve more barroom spins. Loveless was successful with this album in 1994; what sets it apart is how fresh it still sounds. —N.W.

Bobbie Gentry was a true original, a Mississippi girl from Chickasaw County who became a singer-songwriter with her own unique style of Southern Gothic melodrama. Gentry scored a Number One hit with “Ode to Billie Joe,” the spooky acoustic tale of a farm girl and the secrets she shares with a dead neighbor boy. To this day, people still have theories about what she and Billie Joe were throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge. (Gentry has never spilled the secret.) The whole album showcases her conversational storytelling, her ominous guitar, and most of all, her husky, lowdown Delta twang. —R.S.

One great shibboleth about Merle Haggard is that he sang about prison all the time — not really, not proportionately. But when he did, the conviction in his voice and you-are-there scene setting were absolute; and on 1968’s Mama Tried, there are several such songs: the title classic (“I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole”), its virtual sequel “I Could Have Gone Right,” a spirited run through “Folsom Prison Blues.” It’s not a concept album — he’d make those in due time — but it plays as one thing, a showcase for Hag the singer: lean, weathered, and ripe. —M. Matos

Multimedia artist and songwriter Terry Allen conceived his oddball double LP as a sharp commentary on the lonesome desolation of the West Texas hometown he’d fled as soon as he learned how to drive. But after recording the album in Lubbock’s Caldwell studios, Allen had a revelation: He’d written a love letter. “It wasn’t until I listened back … that it dawned on me: The songs weren’t angry,” he said. The result was a sprawling, piano-country concept record full of empathetic portraits of oddball characters of Allen’s youth (see: “The Wolfman of Del Rio). “The Beautiful Waitress,” meanwhile, showed off Allen’s Texas humor, and “Amarillo Highway” soon became a panhandle standard covered by Robert Earl Keen and Sturgill Simpson. The album has been a template for country-music outsiders making left-field concept records ever since. —J.B.

By 1990, Reba McEntire knew how to cover her bases: picking songs that featured her agile voice while also allowing her to exercise her theatrical side via lighters-up ballads or raucous pop tunes. Rumor Has It shows her at the peak of her powers and runs through her full range, even opening with a song, “Climb That Mountain High,” that she co-wrote with Don Schlitz. The standout, which would become Reba’s signature song, is the one everyone knows: “Fancy.” McEntire summons righteous indignation to transform Bobbie Gentry’s lilting tune into one of pop music’s all-time great anthems — an undeniably feminist treatise that was lightly suppressed on country radio for its cheerful embrace of sex work (She ain’t done bad!). It’s country, but it’s also rock & roll by any possible definition. —N.W.

The title track, a satire of small-town hypocrisy, gave Texas-born Jeannie C. Riley a classic smash hit. The subsequent album is filled out with musically and thematically similar tunes, several composed by “Harper Valley P.T.A.” author Tom T. Hall. “Widow Jones” is a morally hands-off salute to a woman who murders her husband and gets off because the boys down at city hall are partial to her curves. “Run Jeanie Run” is about a farm girl who gets stuck taking care of her nine siblings after her parents die, then runs off herself. “Satan Place” is literally the exact same story as “Harper Valley P.T.A.” But the whole thing has a brash, no-frills energy, and Riley puts everything across with Loretta Lynn-size spunk to make for a great slapdash concept record. —J.D. 

A rhyme slinger whose talent for concise, punchy tunes was leavened by a one-of-a-kind sense of humor, Miller ran off a string mid-Sixties hits including “King of the Road” and absurdist masterpiece “You Can’t Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd.” His debut, Roger and Out, comes with two classics: the teenage drunk’s lament “Chug-a-Lug,” and “Dang Me,” about a new dad who can’t give up his partying ways. Both songs went Top 10 pop at the height of the British Invasion, perhaps because Miller’s music could be as slippery as his wordplay, nodding to rock & roll and jazz, while the arsenal of comedic ticks he deploys here even help put across lesser goofs like “The Moon Is High (And So Am I)” and “Squares Make the World Go ‘Round.” —J.D.

The first release by Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley’s supergroup, Hell on Heels tapped into a tradition of Trio just as Lambert’s country-radio clout was reaching new highs. If it was a risk, it was a well-chosen one, tailor-made for those who found Lambert’s devil-may-care attitude toward Nashville norms refreshing as well as those who’d (stupidly) written her off as just another Music Row blonde. Each singer’s voice is instantly recognizable, from Lambert’s Texas twang to Monroe’s Appalachian soprano to Presley’s gentle, clear alto; together they tell a slew of believable, funny, deeply felt tales of women who are, frankly, sick of this shit. “I’ve been thinking about setting my house on fire,” they croon on the opening to “Housewife’s Prayer” — the sweetest subversion you’ve ever heard. —N.W.

“I consider myself to be a straggler of the outlaw movement in the Seventies more than a part of any ‘new country,’” Steve Earle said when journalists lumped him alongside Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam in the mid-Eighties, “basically because it was a singer-songwriter movement.” And Guitar Town, Earle’s landmark debut, was full of not just good songs but startlingly well-written ones — the title track’s best line, “I’ve got a two-pack habit and a motel tan,” is practically thrown away near the end — and a groove that cooks throughout. Or, as Earle also put it: “It’s rock & roll, but I’m a country singer.” —M. Matos

Fresh off the blockbuster success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, Gillian Welch and creative partner Dave Rawlings could have spent a lifetime capitalizing off the popularity of the film and its old-time music. Welch turned down an offer join the O Brother tour, instead decamping to Nashville’s RCA Studio B to make Time (The Revelator), an album that traveled to new creative places through Welch’s preternatural voice, Rawlings’ thrilling approach to guitar, and lyrics that veered between impressionistic and specific. “Everything Is Free” is a more-relevant-than-ever lament for creating art in a world that doesn’t value music, while “Elvis Presley Blues” somehow finds untread sadness over an icon’s death. It’s capped off with the 15-minute “I Dream a Highway,” which breathes and lingers in space unlike anything before it. —M.R.M.

An early country-concept album that looks at a breakup not only from both sides but also from a multitude of angles, Phases and Stages was produced by Jerry Wexler and cut with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section — the studio hotshots who’d made hits for Aretha Franklin and the Staple Singers — and marked Nelson’s most definite steps away from Nashville orthodoxy to date. That went for the music as well: The scrappy, first-take intensity of “Pretend I Never Happened” matches the affair it describes, while “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone” offers strings and aching pedal steel that skirt countrypolitan without succumbing fully. The album wasn’t a big seller — it set the table for those that were — but it established Nelson as one of the Seventies’ definitive artists. —M. Matos